That would allow ccgs to be played fairly easy, and allow any number of other card games such as Three Dragon Ante (whicn has two decks with a variety of ways to mix and match the "suits") or even Phase 10 and Uno.

That feels less like "feature creep" and more like "feature rocketing straight out of the atmosphere and headed for Mars"... but Jase has said it's not really our job to gauge the difficulty of these things, so sure, that would be awesome.

That would allow ccgs to be played fairly easy, and allow any number of other card games such as Three Dragon Ante (whicn has two decks with a variety of ways to mix and match the "suits") or even Phase 10 and Uno.

The dice roll to support this is the easy part. Roll XdY where X is is the number of draws, Y is the number of cards, and set unique=yes. Easy peasy. (But in the case of Tarot, not Xd78 as one might think, but Xd156, to account for upright and reversed meanings.)

The hard part would be building the interface to make a symbol table, because not all card decks have the same suits, values, names, meanings, etc.

Of course, others may have different ideas. It is certainly possible some of these columns in the table for a deck might be dealt with in other ways by the dice roller.

Then again, I'm making presumptions I probably shouldn't about the best method for simulating a deck of cards.

Mods: would further discussion of methods and practices be welcome here?
Aside from practical considerations, there are also legal ones. Building a deck simulator for copyrighted cards (Yugi-Oh, Deck of Fate, etc.) might present ethical challenges...

Mods: would further discussion of methods and practices be welcome here?
Aside from practical considerations, there are also legal ones. Building a deck simulator for copyrighted cards (Yugi-Oh, Deck of Fate, etc.) might present ethical challenges...

I'm not a mod, but I'd like to respectfully ask that the greater substance of the different varieties of cards in your post and the one you were referencing be opened in another thread. I do of course have a bias in that regard, so take of that what you will.

I'm not a mod, but I'd like to respectfully ask that the greater substance of the different varieties of cards in your post and the one you were referencing be opened in another thread. I do of course have a bias in that regard, so take of that what you will.

Duly noted. You're entirely correct: further discussion on that line strays a bit from the actual topic here, which deals with Tarot.

Any further discussion on this line, if proven needful, will be pursued elsewhere.

That's what I like to see - sorted before I get here ! Thanks for that. <grins>

Yup, feature creep is one thing, but the custom cards suggestion is really another matter entirely. For what it's worth, my opinion is that the copyright problem will be a killer, but as we've said that's a discussion for another thread.
Very good point about the reversed option taking the Tarot deck out to XD156 - anything else that needs to be taken into account ... from a quick look at wikipedia, it seems the occult deck with major/minor arcana is the most commonly used, though there's also some Italian, Italian-Portuguese and French gaming decks.

Even with just the occult deck, wiki suggests there's some variation in naming the suits, specifically batons/wands/rods/staves and coins/pentacles/disks. Is there a more widely used/preferred term ?

Reversals aren't that simple, though - it's not half and half. If anything, you kind of decided that when you shuffle. Also, it doesn't double the number of cards, because you're not going to have, say, The Moon, and The Moon Reversed, in the same draw, which could totally happen if you just double the size of the deck. So from the system's side of things, that has to be, "Draw a card, then decide if it's reversed or not."

Really, it sounds a little cold, but ideally there would be a space to fill in, like, "% Reversed" when you draw. Unfortunately, the open space that comes with different systems is already needed for "No of cards", so I don't know where you could put that.

If it needs to be just standard, I'd say maybe each card should have at most a 20% chance of being Reversed, but then again, that might just be the way I shuffle. I always feel like they should be rare, so I don't turn very many.

Maybe at the beginning of any Tarot draw, the system could randomly generate a number from 5-25 and that would be the percent chance of a card being reversed in this set?

I actually like Staves and Coins best -- but for annotation purposes, since Swords and Cups are pretty standard, Pentacles and Wands is more useful since they start with different letters.

If it needs to be just standard, I'd say maybe each card should have at most a 20% chance of being Reversed, but then again, that might just be the way I shuffle. I always feel like they should be rare, so I don't turn very many.

I don't really need reverses, but if I did, I'd hazard that on any shuffle, the faces are either up, down(reversed), left to right, or right to left, and each accounts for 25%, not 20%. I'd also hazard that half of those left to rights and right to lefts get turned up, and the other half down. Assuming reversed is down, that should suggest (25+12.5+12.5)%.

I'm not sure I follow you there. You can't flip a card left-to-right without turning it over - they're either right-side-up or upside-down. And you don't get cards sitting sideways in the deck. And I can't make any other kind of sense out of that "left to right or right to left" thing. If you're doing a reading, you might lay a card sideways (say, if you're Crossing, or for certain layouts), but you do that on purpose and it's still drawn either normal-or-reversed, not... left-to-right or folded into an origami crane or anything.

But when you're shuffling a deck of Tarot cards, you kind of have to deliberately turn some around. They don't do it by themselves, there's no natural way of shuffling that does it accidentally, and there's even a convention that if you start dealing them out and most of them are coming up Reversed, then probably the deck was handed back backwards and you should turn everything over.

And I, at least, tend to only turn a few, and I think that's true for most people. So that's where I get 20% tops, but really it would be better if it could be defined when you draw. I just can't think where to put that.

Maybe that open field could use a comma? So, like, "No. of cards, % reversed", so that you would enter, say, "12, 15" to draw 12 cards, each with a 15% chance of being reversed? Or if you just put in "12", you'd get 12 cards and no reversing. That's similar to the Manual Entry box, but probably confusing enough to need to be explained somewhere -- like, for example, that little line of text that also updates when you choose a system. That might work.

I didn't see Horus's, but Steelsmiter's post was pretty awesome, I have to say, even if it left me feeling like I need to go spend like twenty minutes watching myself shuffle cards...

So, where are we at? I think we were at, yes, adding a Tarot Deck to the decks of cards is probably a good idea, and from there, it would be really good if there's a way to set how likely they are to be Reversed?

Based on a comment from The Other Thread that still seems relevant here, I do think having a full deck and a Major Arcana Only deck would be useful -- a lot of game applications for Tarot cards, especially, do rely on only the Major Arcana because they're clearly the most fun. And since we have regular cards differentiated just for with-and-without-Jokers, that seems totally reasonable without getting into the Fully Customizable discussion.

I didn't see Horus's, but Steelsmiter's post was pretty awesome, I have to say, even if it left me feeling like I need to go spend like twenty minutes watching myself shuffle cards...

Wasn't much to see in my post: I drew a Celtic Cross layout to explain a concept (cards in "crossing" orientation in a layout) that really didn't require explanation on review of the post to which I was replying.

quote:

So, where are we at? I think we were at, yes, adding a Tarot Deck to the decks of cards is probably a good idea, and from there, it would be really good if there's a way to set how likely they are to be Reversed?

And I think, based on earlier observations made, the way to go there is to randomize the deck itself, including any reversals, based on an algorithm that simulates cutting and shuffling the deck prior to the draw. That does seem rather outside the scope of the dice roller as it presently stands, though.

Absent that, a simple Xd2 for each card drawn can settle that well enough for most purposes. Each card drawn has only two possible states (Upright and Reversed), and, even if the usual method of cutting the deck introduces reversals at either a 1/3 or 2/3 rate (depending on the sequence of turns during the cut), eventually, since the deck is not "straightened" between readings, the probability of reversal actually is still 1/2 for any card drawn.

quote:

Based on a comment from The Other Thread that still seems relevant here, I do think having a full deck and a Major Arcana Only deck would be useful -- a lot of game applications for Tarot cards, especially, do rely on only the Major Arcana because they're clearly the most fun. And since we have regular cards differentiated just for with-and-without-Jokers, that seems totally reasonable without getting into the Fully Customizable discussion.

Absolutely. Having the Major and Minor Arcana and the unified deck separately available supports the full range of Tarot-related operations. Given a way to sort out reversal states, the rest seems almost trivial coding-wise.